Rose Colored Glasses
by Orahiko
Summary: Some things never change. And then they do. Yaoi, SetoJou


Dedicated to Selanika, who, though doubtfully will read or therefore understand and experience the fact that this was written for her, or indeed may not even appreciate it, owing to the fact this is messed up, still, it's there people. It's there. Plus, she's great.

If you don't like it, flame. If you like it, tell me. Try to be actually honest for once in a review.

Jou

On the inside, Kaiba and me are very much alike, to a discerning, careful observer.

That's crap. That's a complete lie, to be honest. The people who say that speak quickly and carelessly, without a single thought to _us_. Who we are.

To a truly clear-sighted person, they can inspect and watch and determine, snickering, that 'under all our apparent differences, him, the elegant young man, and me, the brash punk, are in fact, the same deep down.' Anyone who cared to pay attention would notice that. We both had a troubled childhood. Are protective of younger siblings and are duelists, and friends of Yugi Moto. Yeah, we're all the same inside, and if you dig real deep, you can find a loving, protective childhood deprived little boy, and in my case, a sensitive, eager fountain of untapped talent.

Yes, I said eager fountain. Don't freak out. Don't just sit on your ass and laugh your head off. I'm not kidding. I didn't make this up.

They did. The people all around us, who see bright images on a fuzzy screen, safe and comfortable in middle class suburban homes of tall teenage figures with determined expressions and amazing comebacks…yeah, those people. They could write a novel with the information they 'know' about us. They have. In their heads.

Whatever. It's their goddamn lives to do with as they please, if they want to stare and gawk, and demand autographs and signatures that they think, by some way, traces of handwriting and brushes of fallen dead skin follicles and imprints of dirty hands will spread experience, they're more than welcome and I'll roll out the red carpet myself, if only to watch the eager, greedy faces crowd around. Spread the joy. Spread the sadness. Spread the feeling of having the people around you picked off one by one time and time again…and not knowing if it's gonna work out okay this time. Be on your way to becoming a great duelist, the best in your hometown, hell, in your entire nation, but back off. Get out of _my _face and try not to step on my toes, and please, for the love of god, don't whine.

I don't think I'm better than anyone. But if it's too much to ask, give me a little thing called personal space.

Spread the paranoia.

Every day, I wonder if somebody's going to try to take over the world, and hope it coincides with my math test. I look out for dark alleyways and smirking pimple-faced punks and toughs, just like I did **before**, but not to beat them up, tell them to back off, prove who's tougher and defend my friends. No, I look out for them to tell them to back off so they won't get hurt, get killed, or become brain-dead. It's like my own protection agencies, only with no cash flowing in. I can't trust a free gift ticket, for fear it'll snatch some soul away. I can't sign an autograph, for fear someone's going to steal my deck. Or kidnap me. Or Shizuka. I can't become friends with a stranger I just met, without being afraid he's going to control me, or hurt people, or even be the big bad guy himself. I just can't. Those things are luxuries to me, not to the eager fans, or to the competitive kids.

Spread the mental fixations, it happens after prolonged exposure to the nicest, most trusting guy in the world, my best friend, Yugi Moto.

I can't stay on the outskirts, so maybe that's why I became a good duelist. I can't bear to think of people's lives in my hands, so maybe that's why I became a great duelist. I can't bear to see my friend fighting out there, like the front lines of some demented war aimed straight at him, like a nuclear bomb with his name on it, heat seeking, and aimed up close at twenty yards. Look down the barrel of one of those awesome cast iron wide bellied Western cannons and I swear, you'll see Yugi's head. It's not like it's hard to miss. The coordinates are set. The cannon's loaded and ready. That little red dot of light is bobbing directly in the middle of his forehead. That's Yugi. He's my friend, and I'd die for him, but I wish for once in his life he's get down. Not be a target.

Maybe it's all just magnetism.

Boom, goes the cannon. The bomb launches, cutting through air like rippling water. Tearing through clouds, shredding them into wisps. Ghosts, like Yugi would be if he weren't so…. damn Yugi.

I'm there.

Spread the instant protectiveness of everyone likely to be in the line of fire.

We're all suckers, but there really isn't anything that _can _change. If Yugi weren't there, where would the world be? If the world weren't there, were would we be? If Yugi wasn't here, if we weren't there, where would the rest of us and Yugi be?

It's like an addiction. But we aren't heroes. We're trained, battle hardened survivalists.

We would so die in a war.

If this was a war.

We aren't heroes. Yugi is.

To be a hero, someone has to know about you. You have to have an audience, someone watching to clap and cheer and gasp at the right parts and smile at the end. You can't be a hero saving a building, unless it's a monument, a personification of hopes and dreams and an idea. And ideal. You can't be a hero saving an inanimate object. It has to live and breathe and understand death to understand what you've given it. People talk about small heroes, moms and dads and firemen and children, but they're witnessing it as they speak, even in general, though those people may never know they've been appreciated thus. It just spoils things.

He's not a small hero.

The world isn't a small place, even if it's an inanimate object, because it personifies life, and he didn't really save _it_, itself. Just the people. He saved it from eventual domination, at the hands of Bakura and Marik and Pegasus. He saved it from destruction under the great Leviathan. That's not what you call a small deed, but an unforeseen one, something that simply can't be done, so people never think about it.

I think about it. A lot.

It scares me. If that changed one single damn thing I might still be petrified, sweating out my guts in a dusty corner in a creaky ship, too terrified to come aboard, but it doesn't. So I stopped. There isn't anything else to do in a tight spot except panic and shout words of encouragement and quite sound advice, considering the circumstances, but I know from a hands on point of view the people in the line of fire, staring down the barrel of the cannon don't tend to pay a whole lot of attention to what the peanut gallery is shouting. That includes advice like, kick him in the shin and run like hell.

Kick his Egyptian ass back to his tomb.

For god's sake, Yugi, stop trying to reform him and call on the Heart of the Cards, or whatever's been helping you win since Kaiba!

Spread the unhappiness. Spread the general discontent with life. Spread the anomalies, the claustrophobia, the incredible frustration and unhappiness, the endless migraines and impending coronaries. Spread the friendship.

Get out of my face.

I am not like Kaiba.

Don't make assumptions about someone you've never met, never talked to; never shared a life threatening incident with.

You're not my friend because you see me on TV.

You're not my friend because I kicked your ass in a tournament, then shook your fingerless gloved dyed synthetic leather glove bought for twenty bucks in a department store be cause it advertised, All-The-Great-Duelists-Wear-This, -Ten-Percent-Off, so your mom bought it anyway, though it was probably made by child slave workers in a third world country, and said, good game.

Deal.

If it comes down to deciding worse childhood, Seto Kaiba wins. By default. Ten to zero, I'll give him that. My mom became an icicle, but he had the illusion of a loving family that could have stayed that way. But I moved to a semi-shady part of town, and he lived in the Kaiba Mansion.

We're both protective siblings, true. He just has more to protect his brother from, bodily speaking. But that doesn't mean we're alike in this respect.

My childhood wasn't unusual. His was.

I love Shizuka. She's my baby sister, the girl I want to protect and have her look up to me. The one whose opinion counts more than despair does.

We grew up together. Two runny-nosed little kids with scrawny elbows, hers were delicate, even then, mine, red and scabbed. She's the one who was with me, digging into old drawers, past dusty battery packs, past embroidered silk scarves and never looked at envelopes of snapshots of vacations, birthdays, anniversaries, christenings. She was there in the oatmeal bathtub with me, covered in pocks of red that even dotted our noses down to out toes. Along the spine. Along the ear cartilage and under arms, behind lashes and under eyebrows, two little kids, sharing the ultimate oatmeal nirvana and the childish equivalent of Chinese water torture. Look past fireflies and broken, worm-eaten tiger lilies, past gold painted macaroni necklaces to be thrown away and tinsel scepters. Look past cardboard swords and museum glass, forever preserving precious artifacts of metal, jewels, frail carved wood and bone, enamel and porphyry, unmoving and crystallized in pure, lemon scented glass. Look past chicken soup and plastic bottles of Benadryl. Metal and paint scarred playgrounds with words graffitied on that we were years too young to read, and months too young to speak. Iced birthday cakes and sugar numbers.

Even if she weren't my sister, I'd love her forever.

Kaiba doesn't live in Domino. He lives in a world of electric letters and pristine surfaces, the kind of world where you don't buy anything, because you already have it. His house gleams, silver and marble on every floor. His garden is full of imported flowers, the lawn is like satin, always green, always gleaming, with the all natural, rugged yet casually elegant look that only a team of gardeners, working daily can produce. His trees aren't special, except for the fact that every time one dies another, identical one replaces it. Neatly, of course, and without lines on the turf. His house is always air conditioned, temperature controlled, and the windows are crystal, not simple glass. Bulletproof, I bet.

He may have had a childhood, but it's not there.

Supposedly, memories are altered by especially vivid experiences and desires.

I think that about covers it.

Shizuka's my sister, and no one can say otherwise. I'm me. Me. Katsuya Jounouchi, sixteen, dirty blond, 178 cm, 62 kg. Suspect wearing a green jacket and white turtleneck, and jeans so worn they're thrown is the pile deemed 'rags' and let there.

Not Kaiba. Not Seto, because no matter how rude that is, his last name isn't Kaiba. You can't buy a name, but you can sure as hell make everybody call you by it.

Where he lives, blood counts. In the corporate world, people smile at you, hefting champagne flutes, discuss your past, future, and parents, and how exactly to strip you penniless, and, if you're really powerful, how to slit your throat and make it look like an accident while they merge with what's left of your company. But you have to be really special for that, or they won't waste the attentions of the intimidating looking muscular guys, if only to strut their enforcers. That's what they call them. That's what you call them, when you're around. Enforcers. The carpet is silk velvet, and blood's a bitch to clean. An affordable bitch. Call it a compliment, if your blood is blue enough.

Spread the sophistication to the lower classes, or just rub their faces on the products of their work.

Spare me.

Smile for the cameras. Wave as if you can see past the blinding flashes of light, past the sleek silver buttoned black European cameras, past the greedy stubbled faces of thirty or forty people wishing you would slip, fall over, slur, begging you mentally with mantras of, _lethimslipandfallonhisface,_ just waiting for you to make their reputation, getting them raises, with one incident. Make somebody's job if you trip on Italian leather shoelaces.

Or whatever. Something embarrassing, something big. Do a good deed.

Castes. Heirs. Dynasties.

Table after table, sleek glass sided steel skyscrapers full of old men, pouched and wrinkled with fat knuckles and ringed fingers. Fancy business suits in discreetly flamboyant shades, just the right sleeve length to display polished Rolexes with diamond monograms. Smirking businessmen with French hair oil and bad breath and caps over coffee stained dentures. They shuffle and pass around meaningless paper folders full of diagrams that look nice but mean nothing with veiny, mottled, manicured hands. They smirk.

Blood for blood, but your blood is worth so much less to them.

Maybe, if you get down on your hands and knees on the muddy gravel in the hand stitched suit your forty-two year old Jewish immigrant wife labored over, scrimped her time, ruined her eyes, if you abandon dignity and grovel like a sponsored charity owner despite the fact every step is shooting white-yellow fireworks down your spine, arthritis kicks in, beg until tears of shame and anger and pure, unadulterated hate come to your eyes, maybe then they'll let you lick the mud off their car tires while they watch and count every drop of blood they've managed to squeeze out of you, that sweats through your pores and stains your clothes.

Share the urge to rip somebody's brains out, you're so mad you just want to crack their _skull_ open on the crack-riddled sidewalk, and watch the gray, wet cellebrum appear and fall through the split in their bloody skull, and know you can't, you're helpless, hold that feeling and revel in it. Get used to it.

There's nothing you can do to make a difference. You've been through this, step by step, counting the numbers and reasons over your head while you look at the ceiling, walk along the sidewalk, past cafes, bookstores, shops, malls and arcades, past fountains and school halls and parks. Past the three levels of nirvana and the three levels of water fountains, one for kids, one for adults, and one for horses, but you're a teenager and you feel left out.

You can't beat Kaiba. You can't tell him what you think, because you don't have the opportunity or a listening ear. You can't kidnap Mokuba and get it through his skull. You can't stop what you do whenever you meet him because that's the only window of opportunity. Never. Revel in it. Love it. Hate it. It's all the same thing, now.

He doesn't understand. Who gives a shit if what you're thinking about doing to _make_ him get it is illegal.

Flash through your past duel. He wins, as usual, insults you, but everything came clear in the middle of the duel. An epiphany. Your own vision. If nothing changes, then you just might as well choke to death here and now. But it has to.

You hate him, and he can't be spared the effort to hate you back.

Spread the mutual feeling of vague oppression.

What can you say, anyway? It's like the urban myth of the elderly mental patient who escaped from the nursing home and told people about the eminent war.

Nobody even noticed this crazy old man in a hospital gown, running around drooling, with popping eyes. Nobody. They didn't care.

I loved that story. Not many people understand what it means, but it's there.

People are incredibly selfish. They look at what _they're_ doing, what _they _want, and they tune out the outside world. Forget what's happening around them, or simply brush it off and walk on. It doesn't concern them. It's not their business.

Walk on.

The point of the story, the part that makes it so great, so _honest,_ is just he overall fact that despite the man was telling the truth, there wasn't one in a thousand of the passing bystanders that would have listened to him. Think of it from his point of view. He had just left his 'comfort zone', struggled to leave the sterile white walls and acidic air freshener, the plain cots and twisted bodies lying on them, and stepped into a clamor of shouting voices, swears, honks, whistles, odors and color, and finally realized he had the opportunity so long sought…and no one listened. He couldn't make anyone listen. But he went ahead and did his best anyway, unlike the rest of the people around him.

He was experiencing this horrible thing, but nobody understood. Because they weren't him, that's all.

Spread the message.

No one's listening.

Kaiba's right when he calls me a weak duelist. I am weak. So weak I can't bring myself to win. So weak I can't upset the natural hierarchy of THE WAY THINGS ARE.

Right.

The fact that Yugi will always, always, eventually win, the fact that we will always be on his side, the fact that Bakura will always seek the Millennium Items, that Shadi and Ishizu will always be in the background, vague blurred shapes and beautiful, barely apparent faces with blank eyes dispersing cryptic advice, that fact that school sucks and the designated hangout is always, always the arcade.

The Way Things Are, only all in capitals. The things that will never change.

The fact that Jounouchi Katsuya will always lost to the great and almighty Seto Kaiba, because, well, he's such a great duelist. Such a pathetic loser.

No.

I think, out of the millions of battles I can challenge him too, goad him into fighting, and generally piss him off enough to duel me, I think I could win one of those. Just one.

That would be enough. Enough to force his eyes open, to make him realize who exactly he is.

Human.

Flesh and blood.

Blood to blood.

In the world that Seto Kaiba claims to live in, the corporate world, the Kaiba name is spoken in hushed tones or loud boastful ones, preferably behind closed doors, and, usually, over a glass of wine. Even though he's adopted, they can't argue with what he's got, the power he wields. They hate him. They revere him. He's untouchable, their little god of cold plastic and polished steel; sharp as a diamond. Colder than ice, and twice as merciless. He refuses to kneel, refuses to bleed. They can't touch him.

Except through Mokuba.

He's not a hero. He might listen if he was.

The expression, colder than ice, seems cliché. Typical. You touch a piece of ice, the glazed surface of a cup. The surface temperature is bearable, yielding eventually to body heat.

Crystallizing bodies like humans crystallize antiques seems so crude. It's not that pretty. Your body doesn't freeze in the same unchanging untouchable appearance so common in a girl's manga; it isn't covered with hoarfrost the way TV makes it appear. First, blood stops circulating. Your skin turns red in the beginning, and commonly bruises if the process is swift. You want it to be swift. Then, while your skin is mottled yellow and purple and blue from the surrounding cold, and you attempt to breathe, but your body shuts down. Softly. Slowly. Painfully. It hurts to move, and maybe you'll lose some body parts. You resist the urge to wet your pants for several reasons, namely, the added stiffness won't help you any but only help permeate the cold. That's what the term colder than ice means.

It's painful. Very much so.

I can't bring myself to crush his over-inflated ego. I want to, sure. Rub his face in the dirt.

I just can't.

I'm weak.

The corporate world can't touch him, because of what he made himself into.

He's Seto Kaiba.

He's one of them.

But really, he's not.

He paid for his name in blood, but he won't stop paying.

He lives for the hierarchy, but he does his best to topple it.

Kaiba, what am I going to do now? I won't break you. I can't. I could leave my comfort zone, but you wouldn't listen. In the end, theirs nothing I can do.

My only hope is to destroy you. Systematically.

It's not a hope. I think I could exist like this. But I don't want to find out, and Kaiba's part of this. Reachable. I don't think he can exist like this either for very long, so it evens out.

Spread the entropy.

I hate you, Seto. It doesn't matter.

This lifestyle is killing me.

Might as well bring someone else down.

_I love you dear, but you're so fucked up_.


End file.
